Technical Field
The present invention relates to an electronic document generation system for generating an electronic document, and technology related thereto.
Background Art
Techniques are known for scanning an original document and generating an electronic document with an image forming apparatus such as a Multi-Functional Peripheral (MFP).
Examples of the techniques include a technique for generating an electronic document with text data, which will be described below, (see JP 2012-73749A, for example) in addition to a technique for directly obtaining a scanned image of an original document and generating an electronic document. More specifically, a scanned image of an original document (in particular, an image representing characters) is subjected to optical character recognition processing (hereinafter also referred to as “OCR processing”) in which text data of characters in the scanned image is automatically recognized and overlaid with and embedded in the scanned image without being displayed. This produces an electronic document in a predetermined format (electronic document with text data) known as a PDS (portable document format) document with invisible text (or searchable PDF document).
Incidentally, it is conceivable for an external terminal that coordinates with an image forming apparatus to generate an electronic document based on a scanned image generated by the image forming apparatus. It is also conceivable for the external terminal to generate such an electronic document in cooperation with yet another external device (e.g., a cloud server). To be more specific, a case is conceivable in which the external terminal transmits a scanned image to the cloud server, requests the cloud server to perform OCR processing on the scanned image, and receives the result of such processing from the cloud server.
However, a case is imaginable in which the OCR processing service given by the cloud server provides only fundamental functions (general-purpose OCR processing). The general-purpose OCR processing service returns only text data to a client device as a result of the OCR processing. This requires the client device to perform final processing for generating an electronic document with text data.
In this case, for example, part of the information included in the scanned image (information such as the position of the end of each line in each sentence included in the scanned image targeted for OCR processing, or the font size for each sentence) may not be included in return data from the cloud server. This can cause a problem such that, when the external terminal arranges character strings of the OCR processing result in an electronic document, characters in lines next and subsequent to a character at the end of a certain line in a character string that spans a plurality of lines are arranged at different positions other than their original positions. That is, a case is conceivable in which such missing information or the like prevents the external terminal from always generating a satisfactory electronic document. In other words, it is difficult to minutely construct an electronic document based on a scanned image received from the image forming apparatus by using only the scanned image and the result of general-purpose OCR processing received from the cloud server.